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205 shows213 sequences

MAS*H

1972–1983CBSComedy

A comedy that opens every week with casualties being carried off a helicopter. Nurses and surgeons run for the landing pad while the theme plays underneath — an instrumental of a song the network would not let anyone sing, because of what its chorus says.

Seasons 1–11

MacGyver

1985–1992ABCDrama

Improvised solutions cut fast enough that you never see how any of them work, which is also true of the episodes.

Season 1

Mad About You

1992–2019NBCComedy

A married couple in New York, over a theme that was re-recorded repeatedly and once sung by the show's own stars.

Season 1

Mad Men

2007–2015AMCDrama

A silhouetted adman falls past skyscrapers built out of his own advertising — smiling wives, stockinged legs, a hand holding a drink — and then, at the bottom, is sitting comfortably with a cigarette. Nobody lands. That is the joke and the thesis.

Seasons 1–7

Madam Secretary

2014–2019CBSDrama

A CIA analyst made Secretary of State, in the political drama CBS ran opposite prestige cable.

Season 1

Made in Abyss

2017–AT-XAnimation

A children's-book art style over a descent that gets progressively less survivable.

Season 1

Made in Heaven

2019–2023Prime VideoDrama

Two Delhi wedding planners, and everything the families hire them to conceal.

Season 1

Madeline

1993–2007The Family ChannelAnimation

Bemelmans' twelve little girls in two straight lines, animated in the style of the books.

Season 1

MADtv

1995–2016FoxComedy

Mad magazine turned into a sketch show, with Alfred E. Neuman in the titles and a cast that changed almost every year.

Season 9

Maestra: Strings of Truth

2023–2024tvNDrama

A conductor holding an orchestra together while the deaths around it accumulate.

Season 1

Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

2000–2002TeletoonAnimation

A girl, a spotted beast and a pig live on Nowhere Land, where nothing much goes wrong.

Season 1

Magic City

2012–2013StarzDrama

A Miami Beach hotel in 1959, on the night Castro takes Havana.

Season 1

The Magic Roundabout

1965–1977BBC OneAnimation

A French stop-motion series that Eric Thompson re-narrated in English without translating the scripts, inventing different characters over the same pictures.

Season 1

The Magic School Bus

1994–1997PBSAnimation

A science teacher who shrinks her class and drives them through the lesson, with Lily Tomlin at the wheel.

Season 1

The Magicians

2015–2020SyfySci-Fi

Magic treated as postgraduate study, opened with the seriousness of a university prospectus.

Season 1

Magnificent Century

2011–2014Show TV / Star TVDrama

Suleiman the Magnificent's court, and the series that made Turkish dizi a global export.

Season 3

Magnum, P.I.

1980–1988CBSCrime

Hawaii, a Ferrari and a moustache, over a theme so brash it dates the decade to within about eighteen months.

Season 1

Major Crimes

2012–2018TNTCrime

The Closer continued around Mary McDonnell's captain rather than Kyra Sedgwick's chief.

Season 1

Making a Murderer

2015–2018NetflixDocumentary

Manitowoc County in winter over a plucked string figure — the sequence that defined what a Netflix true-crime series would look like for the next decade.

Season 1

Malcolm & Eddie

1996–2000UPNComedy

Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Eddie Griffin sharing a Kansas City bar, four years after The Cosby Show ended.

Season 1

Malcolm in the Middle

2000–2006FoxComedy

They Might Be Giants' 'Boss of Me' over archive film of chaos — falling, crashing and general misadventure, cut faster than a network comedy usually dares.

Season 1

Mama's Family

1983–1990NBC / SyndicationComedy

A Carol Burnett Show sketch given its own house, dropped by NBC and then run for four more years in syndication.

Season 1

Man Down

2013–2017Channel 4Comedy

Greg Davies as a teacher whose life is a sustained emergency, with Rik Mayall as his father.

Season 1

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

Season 1

The Man in the High Castle

2015–2019Prime VideoSci-Fi

Dick's occupied America, opened by newsreel light thrown across a map that has the wrong flags on it.

Season 1

A Man on the Inside

2024–NetflixComedy

A retired professor sent undercover into a care home, from the creator of The Good Place.

Season 1

Man v. Food

2008–2022Travel Channel / Cooking ChannelDocumentary

A presenter attempting restaurant eating challenges built to be impossible, and losing more often than not.

Season 10

The Man Who Fell to Earth

2022Showtime / Paramount+Sci-Fi

The Tevis novel continued rather than remade, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as a second visitor.

Season 1

The Mandalorian

2019–2023Disney+Sci-Fi

A chapter card and Ludwig Göransson's bass recorder — the first live-action Star Wars series opens like a serial, which is what it is.

Season 1

Manhattan

2014–2015WGN AmericaDrama

The scientists at Los Alamos, and the families billeted alongside them who were told nothing.

Season 1

Manhunt

2024Apple TV+Drama

Period engraving and telegraph type, assembling the pursuit of Lincoln's killer out of the era's own printed matter.

Season 1

Maniac

2018NetflixSci-Fi

Retro-futurist hardware and pharmaceutical diagrams in a palette borrowed from 1980s Japan — a computer's idea of a mind, drawn by the machine trying to fix one.

Season 1

Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart

2019–2020Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A cat sheriff who wants to be a legendary hero and is instead responsible for a valley of fruit people.

Season 1

March Comes in Like a Lion

2016–2018NHKAnimation

A teenage professional shogi player and the depression the game is holding at bay.

Season 1

Marco Polo

2014–2016NetflixDrama

Ink drawings of the Silk Road bleeding across parchment — cities, armies and mountains growing out of the map as the journey extends east.

Seasons 1–2

Marcus Welby, M.D.

1969–1976ABCDrama

A family doctor in Santa Monica, and the first ABC series to finish a season as the most-watched programme in America.

Season 1

Mare of Easttown

2021HBOCrime

Delaware County in winter — vinyl siding, chain-link, a quarry — over Lucius's 'Drunk'. Thirty-four seconds that refuse to make the place look like anything but itself.

Season 1

Marianne

2019NetflixHorror

A horror novelist who discovers the witch she invented has been real the whole time, and eleven seconds to say it.

Season 1

Married... with Children

1987–1997FoxComedy

Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.

Season 1

Marry My Husband

2024tvNDrama

A woman murdered by her husband, sent back ten years to arrange a different outcome.

Season 1

Marseille

2016–2018NetflixDrama

The port city from the water, for Netflix's first French commission — a political drama that opens like a tourist board film and then does not behave like one.

Season 1

Martial Law

1998–2000CBSCrime

Sammo Hung as a Chinese detective in Los Angeles, doing his own stunts at forty-six.

Season 1

Martin

1992–1997FoxComedy

Detroit, a hip-hop bed and a lead who plays most of the supporting cast himself.

Seasons 1–2

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack

2008–2012Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A boy raised by a whale, in a sea-shanty register that got steadily more unsettling.

Season 1

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

2017–2023Prime VideoComedy

Fifties Manhattan as a fashion plate — silhouettes, hemlines and neon, moving at the speed the dialogue does.

Season 1

Mary & George

2024Sky Atlantic / StarzDrama

A mother steering her son into James I's bed and the court that followed.

Season 1

Mask Girl

2023NetflixCrime

One woman played by three actors across three decades, from the webtoon.

Season 1

Masked Rider

1995–1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Kamen Rider adapted for American television as a family sitcom with a monster in it.

Season 1

MasterChef Australia

2009–Network TenDocumentary

The British format remade at far greater length, and for several years the most watched thing on Australian television.

Season 2

Masters of Horror

2005–2007ShowtimeHorror

An anthology giving a different established horror director an hour each week.

Season 1

Masters of Sex

2013–2016ShowtimeDrama

Masters and Johnson's research, opened by a sequence of double meanings built out of 1950s stock footage.

Season 1

Masters of the Air

2024Apple TV+Drama

Bomber nose art, contrails and flak, in the tradition of Band of Brothers — and at over two and a half minutes, one of the longest openings on this site.

Season 1

Masters of the Universe: Revelation

2021NetflixAnimation

Kevin Smith's continuation of the 1983 series, opened in the same fanfare it inherited.

Season 1

Match of the Day

1964–BBC OneDocumentary

Barry Stoller's theme, unchanged since 1970, over whatever graphics the decade happens to allow.

Season 7
Season 62

Matlock

1986–1995NBC / ABCCrime

Andy Griffith as a defence attorney in a grey suit, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Matt Houston

1982–1985ABCCrime

A Texas oil heir running a detective agency in Los Angeles because he is bored.

Season 1

Maude

1972–1978CBSComedy

The All in the Family spin-off, with a theme song that lists historical women and lands on Maude.

Season 1

Max & Ruby

2002–2020Nick Jr. / Treehouse TVAnimation

A rabbit of three and his sister of seven, in a world where no adult ever appears on screen.

Season 1

Max Headroom

1987–1988ABCSci-Fi

A cyberpunk satire about television, broadcast on television, twenty minutes into the future.

Season 1

The Maxx

1995MTVAnimation

Sam Kieth's comic animated almost panel for panel, about a homeless man who is a superhero in another world.

Season 1

Mayans M.C.

2018–2023FXCrime

The Sons of Anarchy spin-off, on the other side of the California border.

Season 1

Mayday

2013BBC OneCrime

A May Queen vanishing on the morning of the procession, and a village that suspects itself.

Season 1

Mayfair Witches

2023–AMCHorror

Anne Rice's New Orleans witches, in the same continuity AMC built for the vampires.

Season 1

McCloud

1970–1977NBCCrime

A New Mexico marshal seconded to the NYPD, part of the rotating NBC Mystery Movie wheel.

Season 1

McHale's Navy

1962–1966ABCComedy

A PT boat crew running a black market in the South Pacific.

Season 1

McLeod's Daughters

2001–2009Nine NetworkDrama

Two half-sisters who inherit a South Australian cattle station and run it with an all-female crew.

Season 1
Season 5

McMafia

2018BBC One / AMCCrime

A banker pulled back into his family's Russian organised-crime money.

Season 1

McMillions

2020HBODocumentary

The man who stole every winning piece in the McDonald's Monopoly game for twelve years.

Season 1

Meadowlands

2007Showtime / Channel 4Drama

A family in witness protection on an estate where everyone else is hiding something too.

Season 1

Medium

2005–2011NBC / CBSCrime

Patricia Arquette as a consultant to the district attorney who dreams the cases.

Season 1

Meet the Press

1947–NBCDocumentary

The longest-running programme in television history, and fifteen seconds of titles to show for seventy-seven years.

Season 77

Megas XLR

2004–2005Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A New Jersey mechanic who finds a giant robot in a scrapyard and bolts a car to its head.

Season 1

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

2006–2009Tokyo MXAnimation

A schoolgirl who can rewrite reality and has not been told, in an adaptation that first broadcast its episodes deliberately out of order.

Season 1
Season 2

Melissa & Joey

2010–2015ABC Family / FreeformComedy

A local politician and the man who becomes her nanny, in the longest-running sitcom ABC Family made.

Season 1

Melrose Place

1992–1999FoxDrama

The same freeze-frame grammar as its parent show, moved to an apartment complex and given a considerably nastier theme.

Season 1

Men Behaving Badly

1992–1998ITV / BBC OneComedy

Two flatmates and the phrase the British press attached to a decade.

Season 1

Men of a Certain Age

2009–2011TNTDrama

Three friends at the wrong end of their forties, written by Ray Romano and Mike Royce.

Season 1

The Mentalist

2008–2015CBSCrime

A red smiley face drawn in blood, which is the whole of the series' mythology compressed into one image.

Season 1

Merlin

2008–2012BBC OneDrama

Camelot rendered in gold and firelight, with a narration establishing a prophecy in about the time it takes to say one.

Season 1

Metal Mickey

1980–1983ITVComedy

A robot in a suburban family sitcom, directed by Micky Dolenz of the Monkees.

Season 1

Metalocalypse

2006–2013Adult SwimAnimation

A death-metal theme written and performed by the show's creator, for a cartoon about a band whose concerts have a body count.

Season 1

Miami Vice

1984–1990NBCCrime

Flamingos, jai alai and pastel architecture over Jan Hammer — a title sequence that sold an entire aesthetic and arguably a city.

Season 1

The Middle

2009–2018ABCComedy

An Indiana family with no money and no prospects, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Midnight Caller

1988–1991NBCDrama

A former policeman taking calls on late-night radio, and one of the first American dramas to write about AIDS.

Season 1

Midnight Diner (2009)

2009–2014MBSDrama

The original MBS run of the Shinjuku diner open from midnight to seven, seven years before Netflix continued it as Tokyo Stories.

Season 1

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories

2016–2019Netflix / MBSDrama

Two minutes of Tokyo at night before anyone speaks — a series whose opening is longer and slower than most shows' cold opens, deliberately.

Season 1

Midnight Mass

2021NetflixHorror

Crockett Island in grey water and grey weather, with a church at the centre of it and nothing yet visibly wrong.

Season 1

Midsomer Murders

1997–ITVCrime

A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.

Season 1

Miffy and Friends

2003–2005KRO / CITVAnimation

Dick Bruna's rabbit animated in stop motion, keeping the flat colours and the two-dot face intact.

Season 1

Miffy's Adventures Big and Small

2015–2019KRO-NCRV / Tiny PopAnimation

The same rabbit remade in computer animation a decade later, and given considerably more to do.

Season 1

The Mighty B!

2008–2011NickelodeonAnimation

Amy Poehler's Honeybee scout collecting every badge in existence.

Season 1

The Mighty Boosh

2004–2007BBC ThreeComedy

A stage show that became a radio series that became a television series, and kept the crimping in all three.

Season 1

Mighty Max

1993–1994SyndicationAnimation

A toy line turned into a series with Tim Curry and Richard Moll in it, and a body count.

Season 1

Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers

1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Ten episodes bridging two seasons, with the regular cast turned into children and rangers from another planet standing in.

Season 1

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

1993–1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Japanese Super Sentai footage cut against American actors, and the biggest thing on children's television for three years.

Season 1

The Mighty Nein

2025Prime VideoAnimation

Critical Role's second campaign animated, three years after The Legend of Vox Machina did the first.

Season 1

Mike & Molly

2010–2016CBSComedy

Two people who meet at an overeaters group on the north side of Chicago.

Season 1
Seasons 4–6

Mike Tyson Mysteries

2014–2020Adult SwimAnimation

Scooby-Doo's structure with Mike Tyson, a ghost, a pigeon and an adopted daughter.

Season 1

Mildred Pierce

2011HBODrama

Todd Haynes's five-part Cain adaptation with Kate Winslet.

Season 1

Millennium

1996–1999FoxHorror

Chris Carter's other series, opened with the same Mark Snow unease as The X-Files and none of its wit — thirty-four seconds that promise a much worse world.

Season 1

Milo Murphy's Law

2016–2019Disney XDAnimation

A boy for whom anything that can go wrong does, from the Phineas and Ferb creators.

Season 1

Mind Your Language

1977–1979ITV (LWT)Comedy

An adult English class of national stereotypes, opened by a blackboard that spells the title out in every student's hand.

Seasons 1–3

Minder

1979–1994ITVComedy

Arthur Daley and his minder, and a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about Dennis Waterman.

Season 1

Mindhunter

2017–2019NetflixCrime

Reel-to-reel tape, evidence photographs and audio equipment intercut so tightly that the interview and the crime become one process. Clinical, and much nastier for it.

Season 1

The Mindy Project

2012–2017Fox / HuluComedy

Mindy Kaling as an obstetrician with a romantic-comedy view of her own life.

Season 1

Minor Adjustments

1995NBCComedy

A child psychologist who is markedly better with other people's children than with his own.

Season 1

Minority Report

2015FoxSci-Fi

The film continued a decade after precrime was shut down, and cancelled after ten episodes.

Season 1

Miracle Workers

2019–2023TBSComedy

An anthology that keeps its cast and changes everything else — heaven, the Dark Ages, the Oregon Trail, the apocalypse.

Season 2

Miracles

2003ABCHorror

A church investigator of the unexplained, cancelled after six of its thirteen episodes aired.

Season 1

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

2015–TF1Animation

Two Parisian teenagers who transform into superheroes and spend six seasons not working out who the other one is.

Season 5
Season 6

Miranda

2009–2015BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Miranda Hart addressing the camera in a joke shop, in eleven seconds of open.

Season 1

Mirzapur

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A carpet-trading family running the guns and opium of an eastern Uttar Pradesh town.

Season 1

Misaeng

2014tvNDrama

A go player with no qualifications put into a trading company, and the office drama that made Korea talk about its own working hours.

Season 1

Misfits

2009–2013E4Sci-Fi

Community-service orange and a storm, with superpowers treated as one more thing happening to people who already had enough going on.

Season 1

Miss Scarlet and The Duke

2020–Alibi / PBSCrime

A woman who inherits her father's detective agency in Victorian London and declines to sell it.

Season 1

The Missing

2014–2016BBC OneCrime

A child vanishing in France and the two timelines that follow it, eight years apart.

Season 1

Mission: Impossible

1966–1973CBSDrama

A lit fuse crossing the screen while clips from the episode ahead flash past it — a title sequence recut every week from the show it introduces.

Season 2

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

1968–2001PBSComedy

Thirty-three years of the same arrival: the door, the cardigan, the shoes, the song.

Season 1

Misty

2018JTBCDrama

A news anchor accused of murder, and the husband defending her without knowing.

Season 1

The Mitchell and Webb Situation

2001Play UKComedy

David Mitchell and Robert Webb's first sketch series, five years before the one everyone remembers.

Season 1

Mob City

2013TNTCrime

Frank Darabont's post-Walking Dead series, on 1940s Los Angeles, cancelled after six episodes.

Season 1

Mob Psycho 100

2016–2022Tokyo MXAnimation

Paint, distortion and animation techniques that change every few seconds — a title sequence used as a showcase for what the studio can do.

Season 1

Mock the Week

2005–2022BBC TwoComedy

A topical panel show whose titles cut the week's news into a strobing collage before anyone speaks.

Season 1

Modern Family

2009–2020ABCComedy

Fourteen seconds of family photographs sliding into place, and a card. Nothing else.

Season 1

Modern Love

2019–2021Prime VideoDrama

The New York Times column adapted an essay per episode.

Season 1

Moesha

1996–2001UPNComedy

Brandy Norwood as a Los Angeles teenager, and UPN's first real hit.

Season 1

The Mole

2001–2008ABCDocumentary

Contestants building a prize fund while one of them sabotages it, and nobody knows which.

Season 1

Mom

2013–2021CBSComedy

A newly sober mother and her newly sober mother, in a Chuck Lorre sitcom that got steadily less comfortable on purpose.

Season 8

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

2023–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Field notes, redacted files and creature silhouettes — a monster show introduced entirely through paperwork.

Season 2

Monday Night Football

1970–ABCDocumentary

The programme that moved American football into primetime, and gave it a fanfare to arrive on.

Season 2

Money Heist

2017–2021NetflixCrime

Red jumpsuits, Dalí masks and the Royal Mint rendered as a heist diagram, with 'Bella Ciao' turned from a partisan song into a brand.

Seasons 3–5

Monk

2002–2009USA NetworkCrime

Randy Newman singing about being obsessive over a detective straightening things — a theme that explains the character faster than the pilot does.

Season 1

The Monkees

1966–1968NBCComedy

A band assembled for a television series that then became an actual band, with the titles as their first single.

Season 1

Monster

2004–2005Nippon TVAnimation

Restrained to the point of austerity — portraits, European streets and a single held tone, for a series about a doctor who saved the wrong life.

Season 1

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

2022NetflixCrime

Domestic surfaces filmed too closely — carpet, wallpaper, a fish tank — so ordinary rooms read as evidence before anything has happened in them.

Season 1

Monsters

1988–1991SyndicationHorror

A half-hour anthology from the Tales from the Darkside producers, with a creature in every episode and a budget for none of them.

Season 1

Monsters at Work

2021–2024Disney+Animation

Monsters, Inc. after the switch from screams to laughter, told from the maintenance floor.

Season 1

Monty Python's Flying Circus

1969–1974BBC OneComedy

Terry Gilliam's cut-out animation and a Sousa march — a title sequence that behaves like a sketch, because it is one.

Season 1

The Moon Embracing the Sun

2012MBCDrama

A king and the shaman he was betrothed to as a boy, in the year's most-watched Korean drama.

Season 1

Moon Knight

2022Disney+Sci-Fi

A man with dissociative identity disorder and an Egyptian god sharing him, with titles that split down the middle to match.

Season 1

Moonbase 8

2020ShowtimeComedy

Three astronauts in an Arizona simulator, none of whom will ever go to the moon.

Season 1

Moonbeam City

2015Comedy CentralAnimation

A Patrick Nagel pastiche in neon and chrome, which is the entire aesthetic argument of the series.

Season 1

Moonlighting

1985–1989ABCComedy

Al Jarreau singing a theme written for the show, over two people who spend four seasons refusing to admit anything.

Season 1

Moral Orel

2005–2008Adult SwimAnimation

Stop-motion in the Davey and Goliath idiom, which by its third season had stopped being a parody at all.

Season 1

The Morecambe & Wise Show

1968–1983BBC Two / ThamesComedy

Bring Me Sunshine and a skip off stage, in front of the largest audience British television has ever had.

Season 2

Mork & Mindy

1978–1982ABCComedy

An egg-shaped spacecraft over Boulder, Colorado, and a theme that has to establish an alien, a roommate and a sitcom simultaneously.

Season 1

The Morning Show

2019–Apple TV+Drama

Broadcast graphics assembling and collapsing — the machinery of a network morning programme, shown as the thing that eats the people in front of it.

Season 1
Season 3

Mortal Kombat: Conquest

1998–1999SyndicationSci-Fi

The games' tournament set six hundred years earlier, made for syndication and cancelled on a cliffhanger.

Season 1

Motorcity

2012Disney XDAnimation

A hidden Detroit beneath a corporate city, from the Titmouse studio, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Mouse

2021tvNCrime

A patrol officer hunting a psychopath, in a series that spends its first quarter setting up a reversal.

Season 1

Mozart in the Jungle

2014–2018Prime VideoComedy

A New York orchestra and the conductor who takes it apart, opened in thirteen seconds.

Season 1

Mr Benn

1971–1972BBC OneAnimation

A man in a bowler hat, a costume shop and a changing room door, thirteen times.

Season 1

Mr Inbetween

2018–2021FXCrime

An Australian hitman's domestic life, opened in twelve seconds because the series has no interest in ceremony.

Season 1

Mr Selfridge

2013–2016ITVDrama

The American who opened a department store on Oxford Street and spent everything keeping it.

Season 1

Mr Squiggle

1959–1999ABC (Australia)Comedy

A marionette from the moon with a pencil for a nose, turning children's scribbles into drawings for forty years.

Season 1

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

2024–Prime VideoDrama

The film remade as a series about the marriage rather than the shooting, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.

Season 1

Mr. Bean

1990–1995ITVComedy

A man dropped from the sky in a spotlight while a choir sings about him in Latin, every week, for a character who never explains himself.

Season 1

Mr. Bean: The Animated Series

2002–2019ITVAnimation

The character animated, which suits him — he barely spoke in live action either.

Season 1

Mr. Belvedere

1985–1990ABCComedy

An English butler working for a Pittsburgh family, out of a film series forty years older than the sitcom.

Season 1

Mr. Dressup

1967–1996CBCComedy

A tickle trunk, two puppets and twenty-nine years of the same man drawing on a pad — Canada's answer to Mister Rogers, made by a man who worked on it.

Season 19

The Mr. Men Show

2008–2009Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Roger Hargreaves' shapes rebuilt as a sketch show, forty years after the books.

Season 2

Mr. Mercedes

2017–2019AudienceCrime

King's retired detective and the man who drove a car into a queue of people looking for work.

Season 1
Season 3

Mr. Pickles

2013–2019Adult SwimAnimation

A family dog who is secretly satanic, opened in the visual language of a wholesome fifties cartoon.

Season 1

Mr. Queen

2020–2021tvNComedy

A modern chef's soul trapped in a Joseon queen's body, from the Chinese web series Go Princess Go.

Season 1

Mr. Robot

2015–2019USA NetworkDrama

There is no title sequence. There is a card, and the card is the whole design — which makes this the rare show whose opening is defined by what it refuses to do.

Seasons 1–4

Mr. Show with Bob and David

1995–1998HBOComedy

The American sketch show that took Monty Python's structure — sketches flowing into one another rather than ending — and put it on cable.

Season 1

Mr. Sunshine

2018tvNDrama

A Korean boy sold into slavery who returns as an American marine, set in the last years before annexation.

Season 1

Mrs. America

2020FX on HuluDrama

The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, opened by period graphic design doing the arguing.

Season 1

Mrs. Brown's Boys

2011–BBC One / RTÉ OneComedy

A Dublin matriarch played by the man who writes her, taped with the crew, the corpsing and the fluffed lines all left in.

Season 1

Ms. Marvel

2022Disney+Sci-Fi

A Jersey City teenager who is a fan of the Avengers before she is one, in nine seconds of animated marker pen.

Season 1

MTV Unplugged

1989–MTVDocumentary

Sixteen seconds and an acoustic guitar — a format whose whole argument is in the title card.

Season 1

Mummies Alive!

1997SyndicationAnimation

Four Egyptian mummies revived in San Francisco to guard the reincarnation of a pharaoh's son.

Season 1

The Munsters

1964–1966CBSComedy

The rival monster sitcom, launched the same year, opening with a surf-rock instrumental and a family filing out of a house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

Season 1

Muppet Babies

1984–1991CBSAnimation

The Muppets as toddlers in a nursery, spun out of a dream sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

Season 1

The Muppet Show

1976–1981ITV / SyndicationComedy

An opening that changes every week by design: Statler and Waldorf get a new heckle, Gonzo gets a new way to fail the closing note, and the arch fills with whoever is in that episode.

Season 1

The Muppets (2015)

2015–2016ABCComedy

The Muppets as a workplace mockumentary, which lasted one season and a mid-season change of format.

Season 1

Murder One

1995–1997ABCCrime

Steven Bochco's experiment in giving a single trial an entire season, and the courtroom-portrait titles that went with it.

Season 2

Murder, She Wrote

1984–1996CBSCrime

A typewriter, a bicycle and Cabot Cove — twelve seasons of the most reassuring opening ever attached to a programme about repeated homicide.

Season 1

Murderbot

2025–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Corporate spacefaring iconography interrupted by the soap operas its narrator would rather be watching.

Season 1

Murdoch Mysteries

2008–Citytv / CBCCrime

A Toronto detective in the 1890s using methods the era has not invented yet, past twenty seasons.

Season 1

Murphy Brown

1988–2018CBSComedy

A Washington newsroom and a Motown needle-drop that changed every episode — the theme was a different soul record each week.

Season 1

The Musketeers

2014–2016BBC OneDrama

Dumas serialised for Sunday evenings, with ink and gunpowder titles to match.

Season 1

Mutant X

2001–2004SyndicationSci-Fi

A Marvel-adjacent series made in Canada that Fox sued over for resembling the X-Men.

Season 1

MXC

2003–2007SpikeComedy

Takeshi's Castle redubbed into something considerably ruder, with the original footage left exactly as it was.

Season 1

My Adventures with Superman

2023–Adult Swim / MaxAnimation

Clark, Lois and Jimmy in their twenties, animated in an anime register with an opening to match.

Season 1

My Brilliant Friend

2018–2024HBO / RAIDrama

Naples in the fifties rendered in faded photography, for an adaptation that spans fifty years of two lives.

Season 2

My Family

2000–2011BBC OneComedy

A Chiswick dentist and the relatives he cannot get out of the house, written by a rotating room on the American model.

Season 3
Season 6

My Hero Academia

2016–MBS / TBSAnimation

Superhero iconography by way of shonen convention, with a new opening for each season announcing how much worse things have got.

Season 1

My Liberation Notes

2022JTBCDrama

Three siblings commuting out of the suburbs, in a series largely about wanting to be somewhere else.

Season 1

My Life as a Teenage Robot

2003–2009NickelodeonAnimation

A teenage combat robot who would rather be at school, drawn in hard mid-century angles.

Season 1

My Little Pony 'n Friends

1986–1987SyndicationAnimation

The Hasbro line's first series, thirty years before the franchise found an audience it had not been aimed at.

Season 1

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

2010–2019The Hub / Discovery FamilyAnimation

A toy line handed to an animator who took it entirely seriously, and an audience nobody had forecast.

Season 1

My Mister

2018tvNDrama

A middle-aged engineer and a young woman in debt, in one of the quietest series Korean television has made.

Season 1

My Name Is Earl

2005–2009NBCComedy

A petty criminal working through a written list of everything he has done wrong, one item an episode.

Season 1

My Roommate Is a Gumiho

2021tvNComedy

A nine-tailed fox nine hundred years from becoming human, sharing a flat with the student who swallowed his bead.

Season 1

My Sassy Girl

2017SBSComedy

The film remade as a Joseon romance, with a princess in place of the original's student.

Season 1

My So-Called Life

1994–1995ABCDrama

Snapshots and handwriting, in the register of a teenager's own notebook rather than a network's idea of one.

Season 1

My Three Sons

1960–1972ABC / CBSComedy

Fred MacMurray raising three boys, opening on animated feet in a row that everyone remembers before the theme.

Season 1

My Two Dads

1987–1990NBCComedy

A girl left to two men, either of whom might be her father, by a court that declines to establish which.

Season 1

My Wife and Kids

2001–2005ABCComedy

Damon Wayans running a household on a theory of parenting he makes up as he goes.

Season 4

Mystery Road

2018–ABCCrime

The Australian outback shot as landscape rather than backdrop, for a detective series about who the land belongs to.

Season 2

Mystery Science Theater 3000

1988–1999, 2017–2018Comedy Central / Sci-Fi Channel / NetflixComedy

A man and two robots heckling films, whose theme song exists to explain the premise and then says so out loud.

Season 1

Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog

1998–1999Fox KidsSci-Fi

Irish myth given the Power Rangers treatment, shot in Ireland with armour instead of spandex.

Season 1

MythBusters

2003–2018Discovery ChannelDocumentary

Two special-effects builders testing folklore with explosives, introduced by a montage of the explosives.

Season 1

Mythic Quest

2020–2025Apple TV+Comedy

Twelve seconds of game-engine fantasy, presented with the seriousness of a launch trailer for a product nobody in the show can finish.

Season 1